Warp Hornets Icon Bearer

A very long time ago, I created this icon bearer for my Warp Hornets chaos renegade chapter. Attesting to its age, the paint job is certainly not the quality of my latter day painting skills. Regardless, like many of my Warp Hornets chapter, I've used it many times and even took it to GT2007.

I've dusted it off primarily to show the icon that it is carrying. When I created the miniature, I was looking for something that was a little bit unusual - something that wasn't an ordinary-looking chaos (daemon-summoning) icon. I came up with the metal piece straight out of my bits box that can be seen in the picture. I think it is from warhammer elves (a dragon-riders chair part??). But to be honest, I'm not certain. Perhaps you could enlighten me if you know?

Anyhow, I am still fond of this miniature as it has a unique look. The dragon head atop the icon is very suggestive to me of something chaotic, without it being a rune or symbol of a chaos power or the usual 8 pointed star. It has the feel of something a little more cult-like. One potential narrative is the thought that perhaps these marines have been duped by a dragon-like daemon prince whom they worship? I feel it works remarkably well as an unaligned chaos icon (or in modern parlance, an icon of chaos glory). The lesson I learnt from building this miniature is that chaos icons need not be a simple pole with a symbol on top - they can be more creative and still work remarkably well.

Warp Hornets Terminator Champion

My Warp Hornets renegade chapter contains many older style miniatures and, admittedly, they're not as well painted as my newer collection. The picture below shows a terminator champion of the Warp Hornets. In the language of the old Chaos Marine Codex, he had daemonic visage and a daemonic mutation. In the new codex, I simply field him as baseline terminator champion.

Model.
In the days before the release of the chaos terminator plastic boxed set, I purchased the loyalist marines and set about converting them. This is in keeping with the background of this chapter - they've only recently turned to chaos so it is understandable that there may well be a number of imperial markings that have not fully been got rid of.

For the daemonic visage, I simply did a head swap and stuck one of the heads from the daemonic mutations sprue in to place. For the daemonic mutation, his left arm has also been replaced with a different component from the same mutations sprue - an arm that branches in to two. For the lower arm, I chopped off the hand and replaced it with a power sword from a standard chaos marine. The shoulder pad for this arm is from the standard chaos marine sprue, rather than a terminator shoulder pad. The other added bits include a scabbard and a cloak from the warhammer fantasy chaos warriors range. I also added a number of spines coming out from the shoulder pads - these were cut from unused chaos marine helmets.
Painting.
The model follows the standard approach for my Warp Hornets chapter: predominantly yellow with black in the recessed and blue (or red) for the contrast colour. In addition, I used gold here to highlight a number of areas around the miniature including the shoulder pad and rear of the legs.

Base.
A square base!?! Yes - it wouldn't be tournament legal these days without permission, but its okay in friendly games. The base is covered in a random array of green flock, woodland scenics clump foliage and stones intended for a fishtank.

Evaluation.
This model's heyday was years ago. Its highlight was in GT2007, but I haven't used it outside Apocalypse games since. Despite that, I'm still fond of this model and get it out for friendly games occasionally along with its cohort of other terminators.

Warp Hornets Background

The Warp Hornets renegade chapter were first introduced to this blog whilst talking of the problems that I had had with bright yellow in the FtW weekly round table discussion. In this posting, I'm going to outline some thoughts I had as to their background.

Firstly and foremost, I wanted a infantry-heavy chaos space marine force to game with (GT2007 and earlier games). Large squads already provide a deviation from standard codex space marines. So, I imagined that the transition from loyalist chapter to renegades happened over an extended time period during which the chapter regularly fielded larger troop squads.

Why would they do that? Well, the idea is that they got stuck. Isolated. Cut-off from the astronomican and the imperium at large. The cause? A warp storm on a remote planetary system.

Why were they there? Their purpose was to suppress an insurrection by a significant part of the populace across multiple planets and small moons and artificial satellites against imperial rule. Answering the call from the local imperial governor, the entire chapter re-deployed to orbit the planetary system and set about returning the system to imperial rule. Although it went well at first, the warp storm came along soon after arrival.

Trapped without reinforcements, their positions were compromised through attrition, and their librarians corrupted by the local populace's machinations. Whilst it took years, the warp hornets turned to chaos fully as a means of bringing the populace under control. As much of the populace were already chaos worshipping, it didn't take a lot for the locals to then accept them.

When the warp storms broke, the hornets set forth once more aboard captured hulks to spread the word of chaos. I still field squads of warp hornets from time to time as I still like the idea of a zero-vehicles force. In the next posting, I'll talk about a Warp Hornet Terminator Champion that regularly comes out of the woodwork.

Troublesome Bright Yellow: Warp Hornets Chapter

One colour that I've had a lot of problems in the past with is bright yellow. A while back (several years back in fact), I had this bright(!) idea that I'd field some chaos renegades whose primary colour was to be sunburst yellow. I called them the Warp Hornets and the idea was to have their colour scheme wasp-like: black and yellow. I even took them to GT2007.


The problem is that bright yellow is very annoying to shade correctly and highlight correctly. The picture displays a number of different thoughts that I had to paint the renegades, ranging from multiple drybrushing layers, highlighting in even brighter yellows and making various locations on the miniature a "muddier" yellow. I've never been wholly satisfied with any of the painting techniques that I explored to try to get the look right in my eyes. So, bright yellow remains an unsolved problem for me. The best chaos marine pictured is arguably the central aspiring champion where there is a line of black around the should plates before they meet a gold / bronze rim. It certainly helps it to stand out.

Speaking of standing out, these miniatures certainly stand out against the crowd on any battle field!, more so than the Imperial Fists even. The dominant bright yellow makes them look highly chaotic, but choosing a secondary colour (red, purple, blue, gold, black) was also difficult as the image above testifies. So, if you want your army to be noticed, bright yellow is the way to go from experience. To make them even brighter, try dipping them in gloss varnish; I did!

I'll post more pictures of the Warp Hornets at a later date, as well as some fluff perhaps. I've got a box of these chaos undivided minions sat around, alongside some terminators. These days, I usually only field them in apocalypse or at most, a single squad in an chaos undivided marine renegades army. I am thinking of starting a new chaos chapter that doesn't use bright yellow; I'm thinking blue is much easier to work with.

GT2007 list

Below is my entry to Grand Tournament 2007 (Queensland) that I'm posting here principally for posterity. It uses the old chaos codex (the one that had triple columns of wargear...) along with 4th edition rules and 1500 points value limit. The army performed at an "average" level (i.e. it ranked about half-way up the final results table), but I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend and meeting a bunch of great people there!

Army List.

HQ:
Chaos Lieutenant: Mark of Chaos Undivided; Dark Blade daemon weapon; Terminator Armour; Combi-Bolter.

Elites:
Terminator Squad: Chosen Terminator Champion: Daemonic Mutation; Daemonic Visage; power weapon and combi-bolter; Mark of Chaos Undivided. Squad of 4 Chosen Chaos Terminators: power weapons and combi-bolters except for: 1 heavy flamer and 2 chainfists; all with Mark of Chaos Undivided; 1 unit icon.

Khorne Berzerkers: Aspiring Champion; Mark of Khorne; Talisman of Burning Blood; bolt pistol and Power Fist; Frag grenades. Seven further berzerkers: all with Mark of Khorne, blot pistols & close combat weapons and frag grenades; 1 unit icon.

Troops:
Chaos Space Marines: Aspiring Champion; Mark of Chaos Undivided; bolt pistol; power fist; infiltrate; frag grenades; teleport homer. Together with 9 further Chaos Space Marines; all with Mark of Chaos Undivided; Infiltrate; frag grenades; all have bolt pistols and close combat weapons; special weapon upgrades: 1 with a Melta Gun; 1 heavy bolter; unit icon.

Chaos Space Marines: Aspiring Champion; Mark of Chaos Undivided; Combi-bolter; close combat weapon; unit icon. Together with 6 further Chaos Space Marines; all with Mark of Chaos Undivided; bolters and close combat weapons; special weapon upgrade: 1 with a Missile Launcher.

Chaos Space Marines: 6 Chaos Space Marines; all with Mark of Chaos Undivided; tank hunters; bolters and close combat weapons; special weapon upgrades: 1 lascannon and 1 plasma gun; 1 unit icon.

Bloodletters: 8, with hellblades.

Plaguebearers: 8, with Daemonic venom and Nurgle’s rot.

Heavy Support:
Chaos Predator with autocannon; lascannon sponsons; smoke launcher.


Evaluation.
(1) Mixing special and heavy weapons doesn't work - there's always one weapon going to waste in such troops squads. I should have resisted that temptation but the miniatures looked good (1980's era), which to me was sufficient reason.
(2) Singular vehicles always get targeted and destroyed first. This list should have been 100 per cent infantry with no vehicles present, but I couldn't resist the predator!
(3) Very enjoyable to play with. I'd recommend building 100% troops chaos space marine armies to others. The sheer number of power (or terminator) armoured bodies can be intimidating. Chaos marine hordes are under-rated.

Khorne Berzerkers: Dante Darkheart and Squad

To round off the previous posting on painting Khorne Berzerkers in a rush, I thought I'd share with you the final squad as fielded in Grand Tournament 2007 (Australia).

I won't go over the painting style again, but I will note that the squad has a skull champion (who goes by the name of Dante Darkheart) equipped with a power fist, one member carries an icon (Khorne symbol from a chaos vehicle sprue atop a wooden pole), and two squad members are lead from the 1980's Realm of Chaos era.



To be honest, they didn't perform very well in GT2007. They were typically the first troop unit to get targeted and hence they didn't last long or get in to melee often. Not surprising given the lack of rhino transportation and their reputation for destroying other troop units in close combat!

Khorne Berzerkers in a Rush

When GT2007 was quickly approaching, I needed to come up with a painted unit of Khorne Berzerkers in a rush. This posting details the quick and dirty method that I employed to achieve a tabletop ready quality on my berzerkers. It's most certainly not award-winning stuff - it uses as few colours as possible with the prime directive being to get them ready as soon as possible!

Aims and Model.
The aim here is clear: get a world eaters squad painted up in a rush! The models are standard Khorne Berzerkers with no conversion work applied.

Khorne miniatures have a very well-known colour combination: red, black and brass. These three colours were therefore selected to be the most prominent on the miniatures. In addition, white was used for highlights and silver on some weaponry and recessed areas. That's a paltry five colours.

Painting.
Here's the run down on the rushed paintwork.
Step 1. Apply a solid black undercoat and make sure that it dries before moving on.
Step 2. Drybrush the joints and weaponry in silver -- paying particular attention to the recessed areas.
Step 3. Select red next. Paint the legs, chest, gloves, and shoulder pads. The only trick to the red stage is to leave a small black boarder showing between the edge of the red and the outer (raised) portion of the shoulder pads.
Step 4. Brass. Paint the raised areas of the shoulder pads and other rimmed areas.
Step 5. White. Use for highlights and anything that requires the Khorne symbol, skulls and so forth. The work is now done. Repeat these steps on the next world eater!

For variation within the squad, I choose brass or black as the prime colour (rather than red) in various locations as can be seen from examining the differences between the two miniatures shown.

Evaluation.
These are table ready Khorne berzerkers painted up in a short amount of time: objective fulfilled! They look acceptable on the tabletop with the bold, solid regions of colour being very noticeable. They are certainly Khorne's minions. On closer inspection they clearly lack details that other miniatures in my collection have.

Bloodletters of Khorne in the 1980's

Way back in the Rogue Trader & Slaves to Darkness days, bloodletters of Khorne were a little bit different.

Comparison.
The depicted bloodletters are all metal models that came in two parts: the body and the head (with arms attached to the head part) with the requisite lolling, poisonous tongue. Since purchasing them, some of the arms have become bent out of place (they have been repeatedly re-assembled, stripped, re-based in both fantasy and W40k bases and re-painted over the years), but the squad is still identifiably a squad of bloodletters. The painted colours of red, black and brass certainly invoke the atmosphere of Khorne's foot soldiers.

Assembly of these pieces was tricky. In the end, I pinned the head sections to the body sections as inevitably they tended to come off during transport or gaming. They remain rather delicate pieces of my collection today. Their last outing was at Grand Tournament 2007, but I don't intend to take them to any further tournaments or local games at this stage (despite the hugely positive response that I know they are liable to invoke, from experience). Apart from their now delicate nature, I believe that the 2008 plastic range of bloodletters is an excellent throw-back to the spirit of these models and their depiction in Slaves to Darkness.

What are the differences between the old and the new? The first thing that I noticed was their relative sizes: the old bloodletters are significantly smaller than their 2008 plastic counterparts. This, however, is very much inline with many other comparisons of older Games Workshop miniatures to newer ones. The newer ones tend to be more "heroically proportioned" whereas the older ones were more realistically proportioned.

The older models exhibit a metal band around their head which is not seen in the newer models -- at first glance a missed opportunity to re-connect with Slaves to Darkness perhaps. Then again, if interpreted as collars of Khorne, then these circlets are out of place on the bloodletters and their omission from the modern model is a good thing. The hellblades are also much smaller and less serrated on the older models. I prefer the new model's hellblades in all honesty. What has been retained is the lean and spindly quintessential nature of the bloodletters.

I've over-looked the 1990's / 2001-ish(?) version of bloodletters in this brief discourse -- the ones that have a passing resemblance to beastmen. My like for that range is much lower than my like for the Rogue Trader era and the modern era bloodletters. I do strongly think that the 1990's miniature still has its place as a herald, or champion within a squad of bloodletters; much in the same way that my earlier post on a Nurgle herald used an older, slightly different model.

Given their differences, I don't believe the old and new bloodletters mix very well. I would be willing to make a concession and mix a single 1990's version in together with the newer models. But the Rogue Trader 1980's models simply look too out-of-date and ill placed next to the plastic 2008 range. They'd be better off fielded on their own, in their own unit (if at all), to fit in with a whole army.